BOMB 119/Spring 2012
Paul McCarthy, The Saloon, 1995-96, mixed media, 139×191 x 110”. Installation view showing Dance Hall Girl and Cowboy (Gunfighter). All photos courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.
I always wanted an older brother, so when Paul McCarthy and I became close friends 10 years ago I got the perfect bearded creature of my dreams, someone who was deeply curious about the world, art, movies, storytelling and sports, a closet jock who really knew how to rock climb, throw a forkball (a split-finger fastball) and ski.
Our friendship kicked into high gear while walking around the Getty Museum. I went there with my arm in a cast and was staring at a roomful of German photography when Paul suddenly appeared and wanted to know howl broke my arm. I told him skiing, gliding into a baby fir tree. He was surprised and excited. He said he was from Salt Lake and that his brother was in charge of all the snowplows in the state of Utah, and that he had a serious love for skiing. The next season we were on-slope together, ripping through snow like banshees.
Paul has a rusty, dissonant voice that cracks and lilts. He is a car freak, loves to drive fast, race complete strangers on the freeway. His hairy gnarled hands are creased and leathery like rhino hide. He’s five foot nine and bowlegged, like a stand-up bass shrunken into a cello’s body. He can grow a floor-length beard in less than a week.
Life on the McCarthy compound has a commune feel to it: front door usually unlocked, European visitors sleeping on spare beds and wandering down the halls sipping coffee, piles of photo documentation on the kitchen table. Since the landmark Helter Skelter exhibition at LA MoCA in ‘92, where he exhibited butt-naked mechanical men humping trees and earth on a recycled stage set from the TV show Bonanza, Paul’s career has exploded. Prior to that he was known as a brilliant gut-and-schmutz performance artist who worked in relative obscurity for 20 years, adored by other artists, under-represented by galleries, uncollected by museums. Paul’s particular Grand Guignol came out of a true personal crisis that dealt with the ghoulish properties of culture, consciousness and family. Psychosexual scenes were often played out in costume (Pinocchio, Alfred E. Newman, Santa Claus, Willem de Kooning); ketchup, mayonnaise and chocolate syrup were material substitutes for bodily fluids.
Paul has managed to remain a radical artist of true perversion, dedicated to fucking with viewer sensibility while at the same time achieving broad mainstream appeal. A rare accomplishment.
People close to Paul are forever begging him to slow down, to work less, to not tax the soul so hard, but he keeps up a mad factory pace, employing as many as 15 people at a time (old pals from Utah, boyhood friends of his son and a gang of art-school grads). He is obsessed with building things, particularly shacks, barns, boats, houses, rabbit people with unusual penises. When there is downtime, and there never is, he draws pictures. Paul is a heavyweight champion storyteller: late at night he talks and talks and talks until his entire family is sound asleep, all snoring beside him like cubs in a den.
Paul McCarthy’s radical approach has not been diluted over a lifetime of factory-like levels of production. The perverse psychosexual narratives he became known and admired for by fellow artists in the 1970s exploded the art world in ‘92.
(Interview, Sculpture)